Could the world-wide Facebook outage be avoided?
Facebook apps’ users cut off from vital communication platforms for over 6 hours.
Over 3.5 billion people use Facebook and its family of apps such as Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger for communication with their loved ones as well as in the workplace. The Facebook outage that took place on Monday morning caused massive disruptions, preventing people from keeping in touch, signing in to other devices or from simply doing their jobs.
This outage has been their first major interruption of service since 2019 when their servers were inaccessible for a period of over 14 hours. Technical errors rarely affect Facebook’s operations but when it happens, it significantly impacts the company’s reputation.
Lasting over 6 hours, disruption cost Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder, around 6 billion dollars. In addition to his personal wealth, the company’s share price also went down by 5%, resulting in Zuckerberg’s demotion to the 6th richest person in the world (down from 5th).
It is confirmed that the reason for the outage wasn’t a cyber attack, but most likely the failure of the server configuration during one of their regular updates. This error couldn’t be solved remotely or physically because everything was depending on Facebook’s servers. Eventually the company managed to fix the misconfiguration manually by restarting all the servers. Mark Zuckerberg personally apologised to all Facebook’s apps users.
Many Facebook users log into devices or other services using Facebook accounts. The potential loss of sales and financial consequences that some companies faced during this outage is difficult to calculate.
Some may say that Facebook locked its keys in the car. All operations are unified with systems working on Facebook’s servers so when one element failed, they experienced a domino effect. This raises the question about the cause of the outage and how it could have been be prevented.
To find out what systems and processes should be applied to avoid an outage within your company, download our Standard.
Technical errors rarely affect Facebook’s operations but when it happens it significantly impacts the company’s reputation. In addition to his person wealth falling, the company’s share price also went down by 5%, resulting in Zuckerberg’s demotion to the 6th richest person in the world (down from 5th position).
Facebook locked its keys in the car. All operations are unified with systems all working on Facebook’s servers, so when one element failed, they experienced a domino effect.
